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John Cayley

John Cayley is a London-based poet, translator, publisher and bookdealer. Links to his writing in networked and programmable media are at www.shadoof.net/in. His last printed book of poems, adaptations and translations was 'Ink Bamboo' (London: Agenda & Belew, 1996). Cayley was the winner of the Electronic Literature Organization's Award for Poetry 2001 (www.eliterature.org). He is an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of English, Royal Holloway College, University of London, and has taught and direct research at the University of California San Diego and Brown University, amongst other institutions. His most recent work explores ambient poetics in programmable media, with parallel theoretical interventions concerning the role of code in writing and the temporal properties of textuality (bibliographic links are available from the shadoof site).

In this essay John Cayley reviews Nick Montfort’s #!, a book of computer generated poetry and the code that generated it. Exploring the triangle of Montfort’s programs, the machines that read them, and the output presented for human readers, Cayley situates the experience of reading and writing as intrinsically virtual, powered by its sustained potentiality, rather than its definitive comprehension.

In this essay, John Cayley builds upon a critical legacy that reflects intensively on the process of literature in an age of machine language. Building on a legacy that includes ebr classics like “The Code is not the Text” and many points in between, “Beginning with ‘The Image’” points to the difficulties of translating a procedural code-based text that “finds” its substance in the repository of text known as the World Wide Web.

1999 e-literature award winner John Cayley writes about Saul Bass of classic film title fame. A precursor to language arts innovators Jenny Holzer, Richard Kostelanetz, and Cayley himself, Bass may now be recognized as a poet in his own ‘write,’ important for a new generation of designwriters creating “graphic bodies of language,” moving words and signifying images, in digital environments.